9/11 Commission Leaders Push for More Action on Security

The leaders of the 9/11 Commission on Friday met with U.S. intelligence and homeland security chiefs and urged the Obama administration not to lose focus on counterterrorism and domestic security threats as the nation's political attention moves elsewhere.

Lee H. Hamilton, who helped lead the panel that investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks, said there has been "insufficient urgency" in fulfilling the group's recommendations. "More progress could be made more quickly," the former Democratic congressman from Indiana said.

Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and chair of the commission, and Hamilton have revived their partnership, convening a new bipartisan group to advise policymakers on ongoing dangers such as biological terrorism and cyber attacks.

"What we care about is that . . . the job of protecting the homeland doesn't get lost, so [that] in important debates on energy and health care, the economy and all of that, this always stays front and center," Kean told reporters after members of their National Security Preparedness Group met with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

The group also met Friday with CIA Director Leon Panetta and, the day before, with Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

The high-level advocacy reprises the official role played by the commission, whose hearings and findings in 2004 capped three years of debate over the causes of the attacks. Former commissioners then created a follow-on, private, nonprofit group to pressure Congress and the Bush administration to implement the panel's recommendations.

That group in 2005 issued a "report card" that assigned the government mostly failing and mediocre grades in enacting measures to prevent another attack on U.S. soil. It singled out "insufficient" government efforts to secure weapons of mass destruction, detention policies that incited rather than stemmed extremism in the Muslim world, and declining levels of foreign support for democracy and human rights.

On Friday, Kean, Hamilton and other participants, including former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, said the new group would monitor ongoing concerns such as cooperation among the nation's overhauled intelligence agencies, including the CIA and DNI.

Hamilton said that "80 percent" of the original commission's recommendations have been enacted, but that the government has not done enough to improve first-responders' communications and command systems, to track the identity of foreigners as they leave the country, and to streamline congressional oversight over homeland security.